Darkness clung to the trees long past the sunrise, swallowing the light of the forest canopy. Below, the moisture coalesced into tiny pools that bathed the weak light and cast it back into the thick air. Nothing settled for long in this forest. Like a beating heart, each movement measured the steady progression of time towards a moment of stillness, of rest.

Alize reached the highest branch of a mangled sycamore tree and peered beyond the leaves. The dawn divided the world into intense brightness and dark shadows. The leaves shuddered with each gust, fluttering against Alize’s skin with the weight of ashes. She kept her gaze outward. She knew that the surrounding forest was empty save for a small hunting party, yet the trees weighed thick with foreboding.

Fifteen days had passed since her departure from Julfa. The days had been calm, and cool, but something disturbed the trees. They hummed quieter than normal, with fear as their new constancy. Alize knew not the reason. She had no answers to her questions.

She had thought when she reclaimed her place in the forest, that the trees would press her to join her sisters. Instead of encouragement, the forest was pointedly silent, muting the courage and certainty Alize had felt in Julfa. Now that same adamance felt distant and dangerous. She wanted to believe that she could approach the Hrumi, that she would earn back her membership and fend off these feelings of aimlessness. But she understood the message of the trees.

Patience.

Alize knew how far east her clan was and, for the moment, she kept her distance. The time would ripen for her to confront Celillie.

To occupy herself, Alize had begun traveling closely to a group of hunters who pursued her. Ignorant of her renunciation, they saw her as a Hrumi. Their pursuit had become her closest tie to her old identity.

The chase distracted Alize well enough for the time being and helped her keep focused. She remembered the Mage’s words about other, darker forces trailing her. Something did not sit well with that, and Alize did not know whether the shield he had placed on her remained in effect.

The trees became distraught when she kept the same camp longer than a single night. Their unease spurred her to move constantly, covering great distances each day. Transience had always defined her lifestyle, but now it was no longer her choice. Meanwhile the earthquakes continued and the accompanying headaches reminded Alize that her freedom had not resolved all her problems.

Though Alize tracked quite closely to the hunters that day, they never saw her. At dusk she let them out of range and set up camp for the night. The trees made their agitation plain, but nothing Alize tried could placate them. She lay in her cot for a long time before sleep deigned to come.

Gruff hands awoke Alize as they forced her arms behind her back. Around her the trees moaned in the moonless night, but they had not been able to wake her. Her eyes felt heavy but she yelled loudly enough. It did little to rouse her body. The movements all around her were swift and blurred.

With great effort, Alize jerked forward, striking her assailant hard in the jaw with her forehead. He stumbled but another replaced him, jabbing her deep in the shoulder with something sharp and cold.

Alize shouted even as she wrenched the knife out of her shoulder and stabbed it into the man who had wielded it. He fell slowly and another man attacked her. Her alertness returning, Alize scooped up a rock to crack on his head. Yet another attacker appeared. She smashed his rib cage and then his collarbone. He fell to the ground gasping. Alize was stepping over him when she felt her feet drag and her arms go limp.

She tried to thrash against the unseen force controlling her limbs, but like a dream her efforts amounted to naught until even her fingertips ceased to respond. Weakness seeped through her, eroding her control, her defenses.

An older woman emerged from the darkness. Her drawn skin reflected gray in the dim starlight and her face’s furrows swam in shadows. This skin around her eyes was cracked to emit light, the same as the other Conjurers Alize had seen. The woman pressed her fingers together before her, holding Alize in her spell.

The Conjurer sneered as she appraised Alize. “You didn’t truly believe you could hide from us.” The Conjurer flicked her finger, beckoning Alize forward.

Alize roared in defiance, but could not resist the forces pressing her limbs.

The woman reached out to her, her papery fingers lighting on Alize’s forehead. “Sleep now,” she murmured. “Sleep.”

Alize’s eyelids drooped. She only barely registered the hushed sound of an arrow shooting out of the dark woods behind the Conjurer. Another followed, humming through the forest. Alize’s head lolled when suddenly the Conjurer cried out and crumpled, releasing Alize from the spell. An arrow had pierced the woman’s back.

Alize grappled for her dagger and raised the blade to the lifeblood vein in the Conjurer’s neck. But the memory of the gray magic stilled her hand.

Instead, Alize flipped her dagger to rap the woman’s temple sharply with the hilt. The Conjurer slumped to the ground as her body relaxed.

Alize rose, keenly aware of her vision darkening as blood seeped from her shoulder wound.

But at that moment she felt a second unbelievable surge of pain in her thigh. She staggered. A short arrow shaft jutted from her leg. The pain blurred her vision. She reached for Josoun even as the world spun before her.

But she felt hands close over her wrists and mouth.

Of course, she thought duly. The hunters heard the commotion.

“It’s the Hrumi,” a man’s voice confirmed as they forced Alize to the ground. She wanted to fight but her leg was on fire. The blood was warm liquid agony and Alize could not breathe, could not think. She struggled against her captors but her body was already defeated. Her fear gripped her by her neck, slithering down her throat to nestle in her belly as a thick burning. It held her muscles rigid even as it drove all the strength from her body.

This can not be happening.

The world kept crashing as the hunters overpowered her. They bound her wrists over her stomach. Alize’s pulse hammered as two burly shadows bent over her in the darkness.

One of the hunters swiftly wrapped fabric around the arrow shaft in her thigh to slow the bloodflow and performed the same around her wounded shoulder. Then the hunters grasped Alize’s torso and pulled her to her feet. The action wrenched at the wound in Alize’s shoulder and forced her to take all her weight on her good leg. She felt the strength of the men’s grip on her wrists, at her sides.

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They had defeated her. This was not like the failures she had experienced so often with Celillie. This defeat stung deeper, a darkness that expanded from her core. Alize could not carry it. Her body reacted with violent shivers and cold sweat.

Something far worse than death awaited her.

The hunters loaded Alize onto a horse and a man climbed behind her, breathing down her neck. He smelled of cured leather and unwashed hair. Alize leaned away from him, but it did nothing to dislodge the panic boiling inside her nor to mute his evident glee. It pleased this man to see her bleed. And she had not yet truly begun to suffer.

Alize knew that the princes paid hunters for each Hrumi captive, and this group was rejoicing in their good luck. Her exile would mean nothing to them.

The man directed his horse forward while Alize fought to retain consciousness. The riders moved warily in the forest, but once they reach the steppes, they pressed their horses faster towards the broad fields and settlements of the central Parousia province.

Night still reigned when they approached a walled city. Its gates were sealed but after a brief discussion with a guard, a smaller door opened to admit the hunters and their horses. Alize counted six men, none of them wearing the formal armor of a Sargon. Perhaps she still had some time then.

This city differed from Julfa and Mizre. Though the moon shone above, its light was timid and the shadows were bolder. They chased any movement, leaving the tall buildings in constant flux of silver and blackness. The silence had a brutality to it. It ate all the sounds too quickly. The buildings pressed close, as if they wanted to crush Alize between them. She could not stop shivering. Cold stones and cruelty. This city stank of it.

Her head swam when they unloaded her in a courtyard, but she limped in the direction the men indicated, lest she shame herself by letting strangers carry her – or drag her. Before her loomed a rounded stone building, its windows studded with thick iron bars. A man rose as they entered.

“Hrumi,” stated the hunter guiding Alize. Her renunciation did not matter for his purposes. Anyway, she still bore Rehsan’s soul protection. He led her stumbling into a cell where the jail keeper attached cuffs to her bound arms and legs to lock her in a sitting position. The rusty bars squealed as he bolted them shut. The sound rang in Alize’s ear and blended with the relentless roaring already there.

When their footsteps receded, Alize tried to catch her breath. Ideas rampaged through her mind, but it was her desperation alone that drove her to struggle against her constraints. The bounds were steadfast and soon she redirected all her strength to upshoring her rapidly depleting courage.

All her training had supported a single goal. Do not succumb to the Sargons. It was a lullaby, a promise, and a final condemnation, spoken in hundreds of her sisters’ voices. All admonitions and premonitions.

I know I know I know I know.

And still it could not help her.

Capture undermined the Hrumi assertions of strength against a morally corrupt opponent. Alize leaned back to the unyielding wall and knocked her head hard, cursing herself. But, she thought, it was not my fault. The hunters could never have caught her if the Conjurer had not immobilized her first.

That’s not good enough. The princes cared not that they captured her by chance. It would not prevent them from soultrussing her.

Trembling, Alize pressed a finger to her left wrist and a flare of light appeared under her skin to outline the rune from her dagger binding ceremony. It activated the Hrumi magic to allow her to sense her dagger. The hunters had taken it. It was nearby, but not close enough to call. The light faded from her skin.

I should have flung it into the forest when I had the chance.

Like all Hrumi, her soul rested in her dagger. The Sargons could soultruss her anyway, but it was far harder, far more delicate, and much more likely to kill her. A mercy compared to the fate they sought for her. It was crucial they never know the true location of her soul, for that would make it all too easy.

The dagger binding was the greatest Hrumi protection.

Hrumi souls, sought as they were by the Sargons, were too precious to be left in the fragile confines of their bodies. The dagger binding ceremony could not be performed until menarche, though intermediate protections existed for the children. Alize cringed to remember her own initiation. Of course Hesna should have performed the rite. But after her death, Alize had barely known the Eastern clan sister selected to fill Hesna’s role a salt wielder. It should have been Alize, for the Western clan.

To draw a soul from a body, the Hrumi used halite etched with ancient runes, knowledge bestowed to the clans for protection from Rehsan herself. The rune magic activated Rehsan’s soul to facilitate the ceremony.

Each year on the night of the spring equinox, the Hrumi left their initiate sisters’ souls in salt until dawn. The halite crystals glowed white with the light of the souls within, flickering like lighthouses on the edge of an unknown sea.

A night encased in salt ensured the souls’ desperation, so it would inhabit a dagger instead of a body.

Undergoing the dagger binding ceremony felt like thrusting flame and ice into all the tender parts of a person’s body and mind. It felt like like trying to stand in flood, or to flee in a dream. There was only exertion, strain and failure, again. And again. Even surrender could not halt the onslaught; it only enabled the erosion of self-recognition.

Two winters before Alize’s dagger binding ceremony, one of the initiates failed to awaken at dawn. Her body still heaved breaths, but the soul had fallen too deep to retrieve. The glow in the salt mineral had turned from white to bright blue. The color had stung Alize’s eyes.

Remember, the Eastern Clan leader Benay had told the gathered clans, this is our fate, if the Sargons take our daggers, take our souls.

Hesna dissolved the salt mineral in water. It would destroy that the initiate’s soul so she could not remain captive in her own wasteland.

The initiate’s body had not yet ceased breathing when they buried it. Though Alize had never mentioned her nightmares afterwards, she suspected Hesna guessed their origins.

Such incidences were rare, and the protection from Sargon soultrussing certainly justified the risk. Rehsan had promised that when completed, the rune magic was nearly impossible to reverse. A soul retrieval performed incorrectly would kill the bearer.

Such a death was considered a great mercy.

But Hrumi souls were so valuable that the Sargons kept catching them. They must have had enough successes breaking Rehsan’s magic that it made it worthwhile to keep trying. There was no way to know how many of their lost sisters died in the process or lived forever in torment. All Hrumi children learned that if capture became imminent, they should fling their daggers as far as they could, and hope the Sargons could not find their souls.

Which I failed to do. Alize replayed the incident in her mind, her regret thick as honey. She was drowning under its weight.

If Alize joined other Hrumi victims, her soul would suffer for eternity, sustaining the High Prince’s life while he continued persecuting of her people. In her situation, only one rational option remained.

Suicide.

So Alize had that to look forward to.

Heavy footsteps clamored outside the door before it creaked open. Alize grimaced as she twisted her head to peer at the candle flames dancing opposite her. Behind them, two men stood swimming in iron shadows.

“Looks about right,” the first one commented as he entered the cell, “I’ve seen them before.” He bent down to study Alize. “Took a lot to bring this one in.”

Alize narrowed her eyes and drew up her shoulders. The princes and Sargons ranked worse even than the Kogaloks. They committed the same heinous crimes while proclaiming themselves heroes. Alize tried to work up the saliva to spit in his face but her mouth was too dry.

He reached out to press into her shoulder, igniting the wound with pain. Despite herself, Alize cried out. The sound rang through the prison and the man sneered.

“Animal.”

It felt like his fingers had left filth on her skin. A disfigurement, even if it were not visible like those of the Kogalok Soul Eaters wrought on their victims.

The man turned from her and spoke lowly to his companion. First the clinking of coins sounded, then the cell door shut once more.

Alize tried to shift her position but succeeded only in knocking herself over. The unbearable pressure on the arrow shaft still buried in her leg made her groan. Footsteps sounded again and one of the men returned to prop Alize upright.

She snarled at him.

The man shook his head. “Now don’t you go killing yourself before we can get our Sargon in here,” he warned.

Alize crumpled, simply not caring.